Why Donald Trump Couldn't Lead A Pack of Hyenas

The two main political parties are at very different stages in choosing their presidential candidate: while Hillary Clinton looks set to win the Democratic nomination, there's no clear front-runner in the Republican race. This difference has parallels with how leaders emerge in nature.

Animal leadership is challenging because scientists disagree on exactly what it means. "A basic definition that we can all agree upon is the leader initiates something," says Dr Jennifer Smith, a biologist at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Smith recently led a survey of social mammals by a diverse team that included anthropologists, psychologists and mathematicians. The new study, published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, compared 16 groups: eight small human societies lacking complex political systems, and eight non-human species, from African elephants to the plains zebra.

"Many people assume that humans are somehow unique and special," says Smith. "And likely we are, but we went into this thinking, 'Okay, let's look at the data'." That research revealed leadership patterns that apply to everything from primates to presidential candidates.

Learning from animals

A lot of what we know about leadership is based on stereotypes and not genuine observations from nature. For example, mammalian groups are rarely led by a single individual, says Smith. "There's often this misconception that someone is coordinating all of the behaviour, when in fact much of it is happening on a much smaller scale and there's no centralized authority."

How does leadership of large groups come from small-scale coordination? A president can't control every citizen, but they can set policy and direct their staff, so orders trickle-down to prompt actions that change the behavior of a society. ObamaCare has forced many Americans to alter their health insurance, for instance. Such patterns emerge from a 'fission-fusion society'.

"What you see most of the time is small subsets meeting up," Smith explains. "So you have three hyenas – who's the dominant one, who's the subordinate one? Same for humans: individuals are constantly meeting-up with each other, having to deal with who's the leader, and switching those roles potentially, or keeping them the same."

The big difference between humans and non-human societies is that, in people, a leader's roles are more flexible. Smith's study rated leadership in four domains: movement, acquiring food, mediating conflict within a group, and interactions with other groups. The results showed that in many species, leaders in one domain are leaders in another, being the first to move and also leading from the front in battle – the leader of a pack.

"In the animals that we looked at, we don't see as much role specialization as you see in the human cases," says Smith, who believes that having leaders in charge of certain things might lead to more efficiency overall. "Individuals in the group could benefit from having different tasks allocated to different individuals."

Natural leadership

Hillary Clinton (Image CC-BY 2.0: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia)

Spotted hyenas have female-dominated, matriarchal societies with a dominance hierarchy. "Whether it's hunting or acquiring food, the high-ranking one, she gets to eat first," says Smith. Unlike a U.S. president, who's commander-in-chief but rarely a soldier, a hyena puts its life on the line when fighting other groups. "The high-ranking female is at the front lines when they go to war."

So how is Clinton an alpha female?

Spotted hyenas (Image: David S Green)

President Hillary Clinton would be like a high-ranking hyena due to the origin and source of her political power. The study led by Jennifer Smith looked at long-term data to assess animal leadership in four dimensions: the benefit relative to being a follower, how leaders are distributed within a society, how leadership emerges, and the strength of a leader's power.

Smith and colleagues rated how powerful a leader is using a five-point scale: a score of 1 means leadership is weak or non-existent (decision-making is highly democratic), while a rating of 5 means leaders are despots (they coerce or persuade others to follow). For example, there's weak leadership in a pride of lions, an egalitarian society in which group members help raise each others' offspring. (Donald Trump's penchant for firing would probably not go over well in a pride of lions.)

The Lion King has a lot to answer for. "When they're eating, they'll often share and eat together, and there's not really this pecking order that you might find in something like a hyena," says Smith, making an analogy with the U.S. presidency. "In our political societies, as you have a leader that's starting to move out of office, they might not have as much power as they might have had when they first came in."

Leadership can emerge through a process of competition based on an individual's qualities and performance, or they can inherit power through family connections – what social scientists call 'achieved' or 'ascribed' status. On a 5-point scale, a score of 1 means leadership is fully based on achievement, whereas 5 means it's fully ascribed.

The relationship between the origin and strength of leadership can be plotted on a graph, which shows how powerful leaders are (x-axis) versus how they emerge (y-axis) after converting the scores. Leadership is achieved in bottlenose dolphins, but they have weak leaders, for example, whereas female hyenas inherit power from their mother, and the highest-ranking alpha female is especially strong. "She can make decisions regardless of how any other members of the group are 'voting'," says Smith.

Republicans: too human?

Republican candidates (Credit: AP)

Although Clinton obviously didn't inherit power from a parent, her husband Bill Clinton was a popular president. Family ties probably helped one famous political dynasty, the Kennedys and, as Smith points out, the Bushes. Jeb Bush, an early favourite for the Republican Party's nomination, is son of George Bush Sr and brother of George W, giving him an 'ascribed' leadership status.

If Americans elect a president based on 'achieved' leadership, it does't bode well for charismatic candidates like Ben Carson and Donald Trump, who have little political experience, whereas Hillary Clinton also served as a U.S. senator and Secretary of State.

But the fact that Democrats already have a leading candidate isn't necessarily better, as the drawn-out selection process also provides more time to consider the options. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, delegates will pick the party's nominee. "You might be stuck in that meeting forever because nobody can figure out who the leader is," says Smith. "But maybe at the end of it you'll have a better leader."

Smith won't be drawn on which presidential candidate would make the best leader. "I'm not going to name any names," she laughs. Based on leadership in nature, however, she suggests that a good president should engage in bipartisan politics. "The one thing I can say that would be a very clear message is that the cooperative leaders tend to be more efficient."

I'm an award-winning journalist with a PhD in evolutionary biology. I spent several years at Focus, the BBC's popular science and technology magazine, running the features section and writing about everything from gay genes and internet memes to the science of death and orig...